HEC holds training SIYB programme

ISLAMABAD: The Higher Education Commission and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) are organising a two-week Training of Trainers (TOT) workshop on the ILO’s Start and Improve Your Business (SIYB) programme.The objective of the workshop is to enable the business development service providers to increase employment generation as the universities provide the perfect setting for the students to generate business ideas and get the support and guidance to turn them into real enterprises. Business Incubation Centres, established at different universities, enable their graduates to become job providers instead of job seekers and the dependence on the government jobs is minimised.The universities participating in the SIYB training include Quaid-i-Azam University, Institute of Space Technology, National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, UET Lahore, University of Veterinary and Animal Sciences, Sukkur IBA, Balochistan University of Information Technology, Engineering and Management Sciences, and the University of Malakand.Organisations that are the business development service providers and have an enterprise development programme as their mandate are also participating. These organisations would roll out SIYB through their on-going programmes on the business development and entrepreneurship.The resource persons are Gemenu Wijesena and Shahanaz Kapadia Rahat, a veteran in the field of entrepreneurship and gender equality. Talking about the global success of SIYB, Wijesena described it as one of the most successful programmes in Sri Lanka succeeding in expanding entrepreneurial thinking among the students and leading to creation of many innovative small enterprises. He is hopeful that it would do the same for Pakistan.Small and micro enterprises employ a large share of workers and create jobs in developing economies and help in poverty alleviation. Therefore support to these enterprises has been a policy priority for many economies in the past decades.